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Edited By Keith Allan and Kasia M. Jaszczolt

This book "fills the unquestionable need for a comprehensive and up-to-date handbook on the fast-developing field of pragmatics" and "includes contributions from many of the principal figures in a wide variety of fields of pragmatic research as well as some up-and-coming pragmatists."

Book Information

Negative Concord in English and Romance: Syntax-Morphology InterfaceConditions on the Expression of Negation studies the distribution of thesentential negative marker (not, no, non, etc.) and n-words such as nobody,nothing and the like in Standard English, Non-Standard varieties of Englishand a number of Romance languages.

The author shows that the restrictions observed in the field of negation(i.e. whether the negative marker can or cannot co-occur with n-words, forexample) follow from the interaction of syntax and morphology. Languagesmay disallow, to different extents, redundancy of certain kinds oflinguistic features (e.g. negative features) in given contexts. Whenevertoo many negative features co-occur in a syntactically-defined particulardomain, languages resort to a number of ‘repair’ morphological operationsthat manipulate the output of syntax in different ways. This results in afair amount of variation in the systems of negation and Negative Concord(i.e. the fact that in a given language more than one apparently negativeelement results in just one semantic negation) across languages.

This study opens up a new line of research in placing the phenomenon ofNegative Concord in the syntax-morphology interface. Moreover, by assumingthat variation across languages with respect to Negative Concord is theresult of how sensitive languages are to some morphological constraint andhow they use a limited number of repair operations when the latter isviolated by the syntactic output, Standard English, Non-Standard varietiesof English and Romance languages such as Catalan and Spanish can beuniformly analysed.